Anti-authority Authoritarians

Who’s Behind the ‘Reopen’ Protests?: They are anything but spontaneous.

[Modified for emphasis and accuracy] 

"I [Lisa Graves] first became aware of the political influence of Charles and David Koch in 2009 when I started looking into who was behind the protests at health care town halls.

The Poison Tea Party, formed after America elected its first black president, used a series of health care town halls to spur angry RepuGNicans to oppose the Affordable Care Act as a socialist [read, someone we-consider-undeserving might benefit] takeover of American medicine. Little matter that it was modeled on a plan devised by Mitt Romney, a Republican, when he was the governor of Massachusetts.

Such false claims about the act have not aged well, as millions of Americans now depend on the law for health care coverage as the coronavirus contagion sweeps across the nation. And yet a Poison Tea Party co-founder, Mark Meckler, is using the same tactics and same phony claims to stir his followers to protest against governors seeking to mitigate the Covid-19 death toll by closing businesses and banning public gatherings.

That public anger is both real and manufactured. The same was true in 2009, when the Koch fortune fueled the Poison Tea Party’s attacks on the Obama administration’s health care law.

Still, the legend that the Poison Tea Party was a spontaneous uprising took hold and continues to be peddled. As we face Poison Tea Party 2.0, let’s not be fooled again.

The protests playing out now have the same feel as the Poison Tea Party protests aided by Koch-financed Americans for [Billionaires'] Prosperity and others a decade ago — and with good reason: Early evidence suggests they are not organic but a brush fire being stoked by some of the same people and money that built the Poison Tea Party.

Look no further than the first protest organized by the Michigan CONservative Coalition and the Michigan Freedom [to Profit] Fund — whose chairman manages the vast financial investments of Dick and Ditsy DeVos, the Education Secretary Destroyer — to see that the campaign to “open” America flows from the superrich and their front groups.

Stephen Moore — a fellow at the Heritage Inheritance Foundation, a Koch ally and a Crook-in-Chief adviser — admitted as much in a video (report). Moore is now leading an enterprise to end the virus precautions called Save Sicken Our Country, which includes the Koch-backed American Legislative Exchange Damage Council. Moore boasted that he has been working behind the scenes with a CONservative donor who agreed to cover bail and legal fees for demonstrators who get arrested for defying Wisconsin’s virus protective measures."